Entrepreneurship – My WordPress

Paintings & entrepreneurship style

Your art form says a lot about your personality. A typical oil painting is a very structured art requiring high degree of planning and execution happening over multiple stages (5-12 layers of paint coating).
The first layer: Strategic direction: A charcoal sketch which broadly defines the placement of the various features of the painting.
Second layer: ground work: Where the painter defines the color scheme. The artist defines, which portions are core/important and which are context/background.
Detailing: Here the artist focuses on the core and shapes/re-shapes it till he is satisfied with the output..
Creating the background, supporting features that will give the proper context for the viewer to fully appreciate the beauty of the painting.
Finishing touch which brings all the pieces together.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcw93sF1s90]
Basically the painter draws the face, then the cheek, then the eye and finally the tear in the eye.
However the glass painting is just the opposite, you first draw the features then the background. Everything is other way around. Then there is photography where in an instant the magic is created.
Entrepreneurs are also very similar. There are few which have a vision, a clear goal and a methodical approach. They build partnerships, brand, products each leading to the final goal. Most great product companies are made the same way.
However there are several who just chase the money. They might seem to drift from project to project each of increasingly larger size and hence creating a very profitable group of companies, a conglomerate.
Then there are some charismatic magicians who create companies instantly. Their brand name is sufficient for customers & investors to line up. People are talking about their next product launch even before the company reveals its intentions.
There is no way to compare one art form with another. Similarly there is no way to compare one entrepreneur from another. But like the uniqueness of product ideas even all entrepreneurs are truly unique. Some achieve success through years of sweat & sacrifice while some stumble into success. But to the vast majority it’s always a distant dream. Similarly most people pursue art, but very few create anything even worth the paper it is printed on. Not sure if entrepreneurs look at themselves as artists, but they are not very different.

How do you define entrepreneurship? I measure it on the following 2 scales.
1) Innovativeness, ability to anticipate the changing trend and find a unique solution. One size does not fit all.
2) Having the dignity towards labor and understanding what you do is not important, but what difference you make is important.
3) Ability to scale up this enterprise to increase revenue many folds.

If I look at the rich and well to do, I see them opening up new malls, high-rise buildings, bridges and industries everyday. So most of them have a vision, grand plans and they live to complete them. The era of Tata, Birla where richness was due to inheritance is gone. Most of the Indian richest are self made man.

I was also amazed to find the level of entrepreneurship in the common Indian. If there is a Parent-Teacher meeting, or admissions queue in front of the school, tens of hawkers will swarm the place. Each of them have a unique eatable to offer thus placating the taste buds of everybody. If there is a water-logging, immediately youth will form gangs helping the car-drivers roll the cars to safety. Even before an office is opened, a Pan shop and a tea stall opens up right in front of it. Most tourist places have multi-lingual guides who not only speak their native languages and English, but also the foreign languages. No organized enterprise even in developed countries can match the speed with which they customize their offering to grasp the new window of opportunity. The security guards of most buildings double up as car washers, milk/newspaper delivery boys to earn extra income demonstrating that even people who have a stable source of income keep their eyes and ears open.

Unfortunately most of these success stories are not scalable. If you meet a small time entrepreneur after a decade, most likely he will still be doing the same job, will have the same number of wares. For someone who always thought that taking the first step is like completing half of the journey, this was an eye opener. However little research found a variety of reasons why they failed to grow:
1) The acid test of any business is cash flow crunch. Most enterprises fail not because they were not profitable, but because they could not manage their cash flows. Indian govt, by their postal schemes which pay 2.5% above the bank rates, suck up a lot of free capital.
Banks which have the best information about the credit rating of the people shy away from their duty of lending. They prefer to keep the money in treasury bonds instead of issuing business loans.
2) Harassment: Most people have to pay Hafta/protection money to either local mafia or police, sometimes to both. Not only it kills the spirit of free enterprise, but these people act like parasites damping the whole environment
3) Black money in Indian society: A lot of under the table transactions happen in Indian society. Unless the owner himself is involved, there is huge likelihood that he will also get duped. This is the single largest factor why there are not too many professionally managed enterprises.

to be continued…..